LifesMake City Life Easier with Dunzo!
Life in India is chaotic, and crowded cities can be difficult to sustain. With busy lives and faster working paces, people hardly get time to relax, or even breathe. Imagine being stuck in heavy traffic on your way to work and suddenly realising that you forgot your laptop charger or some important paperwork at home! It might take a few extra hours to go back home and get it. And that’s on top of the epic showdown with your boss when you show up to work 3 hours late! It’s one of those things where you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t! Sounds like a rather unpleasant fix to be in, right?! For ages, people might have faced situations like these, but couldn’t really do anything about it.
However, all those horrors of life finally came to an end with a very innovative and effective idea from a brilliant mind in Bengaluru. A Google-backed app, Dunzo, is promising its users to perform everyday tasks for them just by asking, ‘what would you like to Dunzo today?’ Dunzo is an application that runs all kinds of errands for its customers, and is mostly managed by a machine-learning-based platform.
The Do-it-All App
Dunzo is an all-rounder app that offers to check off everything on your to-do list. Need to pick up clothes from the dry-cleaners? Forgot your lunch at home? Don’t want to wait for long hours in a taxi during rush hour? Want groceries delivered to your doorstep from your nearest kirana shop? Dunzo will do it all for you! It has partnerships with a variety of restaurants, pharmacies, pet supply stores, etc., and offers you discounts to make city life easier. You can just download the Dunzo App and shop directly, to get your work done in simple steps from anywhere in the city. One of the most favoured features is food delivery, Dunzo will deliver from any restaurant of your choice, even if it is located across the city. This sets them apart from most of the food delivery apps that offer delivery from restaurants only for a set radius.
Understandably, delivery is not free on Dunzo. They charge their customers according to the tasks that need to be performed or the distance travelled, all of which doesn’t cost more than a dollar! They promise you quick service and guarantee delivery within 60 minutes of your request. With 24/7 service, Dunzo aims to deliver anywhere and everywhere.
Dunzo is currently operating in nine cities across India including Bengaluru, New Delhi, Gurugram, Mumbai, Pune, and Hyderabad. They have also started their bike-ride services in Gurugram, Hyderabad, and Noida to take on popular ride-hailing giants like Uber and Ola, who already provide their services in this region. Dunzo offers bike rides at a rate as low as ₹3/km! If you don’t have Dunzo in your city, don’t worry, they plan to expand their services to other regions soon.
Dunzo is a very simple app to use. The user raises a task, then, Dunzo assigns a delivery executive designated by a partner company to get that task done. All of this is done with the help of a chat interface. For instance, at the time of assignment, a delivery partner starts driving towards the pick-up location, be it a store or a home address. Once the delivery partner reaches that location, they collect the customer’s order and send pictures to them for confirmation. Once the items are confirmed, the delivery partner then buys the product or collects it from a location, and starts moving towards the drop location. Hence, completing a task.
How Did it All Start?
Founder and CEO of Dunzo, Kabeer Biswas, came up with this unique idea when he moved to Bengaluru, back in 2014. He was fed up and tired of exploring the city in his car. It was around that time when he thought about ‘how life would become easier if he got an extra pair of hands.’ He decided to start a WhatsApp group, where people would ask him to get party supplies for them or even have their car batteries changed. Through word of mouth, he started getting plenty of requests, which made him realise that the idea needs a scale-up. With the three other co-founders of the company, Ankur Agarwal, Mukundh Jha, and Dalvir Suri, they built Dunzo, which now does more than 2 million transactions a month!
Ever since its inception in 2015, Dunzo has become the go-to app for many customers to make their everyday chores less tiresome. What started off as a pass time, has now become the first Indian company to receive direct funding from Google.
Backed by Heavy Investments
By June 2015, Dunzo started getting positive responses and completed around 70 tasks a day. Within the next three months, the company had raised ₹4.4 crores from Blume Ventures, Aspada Investments, and angel investors Rajan Anandan and Sandipan Chattopadhyay. In September 2016, the startup raised over $2 million from Blume Ventures and Aspada Investments, combined. The funding kept growing and soon enough they were able to raise $12 million in December 2017, from Google, Blume Ventures, and Aspada Investments.
Growing Pains
Dunzo has become a saviour for people across all major Indian cities. From delivering food, to medicines, and pet supplies, it suddenly became everyone’s best friend. That, however, wasn’t enough to sustain a startup. The investment community wasn’t very keen on backing up the company at first. Dunzo was almost on the verge of running out of money. Twice! In spite of that, they never gave up.
One of the main reasons for the company’s gradual climb to success and blatant refusal to back down, is the huge fan base they acquired over the years. The word-of-mouth tactic brought them tremendous traction and a loyal customer base. Soon enough, they were praised by millions, all over social media.
The company’s main victory was when Google came calling. Google participated in investing $12.3 million for Dunzo, which was their first direct investment in an Indian company. Google poured in money in 2019, and invested about $45 million along with Lightbox Ventures, 3L Capital, and STIC Investment & STIC Ventures. Dunzo will be using these funds to establish itself as the logistics player in India, picking up and dropping almost every item a customer wants.
Dunzo recorded a loss of ₹169 crores in FY19, an increase of 671%, as compared to a loss of ₹21.9 crores in the previous year. The startup recorded total revenue of ₹3.5 crores in FY19. According to a valuation report filed by the company with the Registrar of Companies (RoC), Dunzo’s valuation was estimated at around $56.4 million in September 2019.
Future Plans
Despite the gargantuan challenges they faced and the style with which they conquered them in the last year, Biswas’ confidence in Dunzo remains unshakeable! He says that he has a lot of ambitious visions for and with the app and that the possibilities and uses of the app are quite limitless. The company is planning to expand, and almost triple the number of Indian cities it operates in, targeting the top 25 cities in the next 12–14 months!
